Path 2

Path 2

A Brief New York Post Guide to Womanhood

May 23, 2014

Another week, another brilliant, thoughtful, nuanced New York Post story about a prominent woman. This week it was their front-page headline about how Chirlane McCray was a “bad mom” for not wanting to spend every second with baby Chiara. McCray talked to New York magazine about how, as a later in life first-time mother, she struggled to switch gears: “I could not spend every day with her,” she told the magazine. “I didn’t want to do that. I looked for all kinds of reason not to do it. I love her. I have thousands of photos of her–every 1-month birthday, 2-month birthday. But I’ve been working since I was 14, and that part of me is me. It took a long time for me to get into ‘I’m taking care of kids,’ and what that means.”

In their writeup, the Post‘s Bruce Golding boiled that down to McCray “neglecting” Chiara, who, he notes, went into treatment for substance abuse 18 years later. Coincidence? Or bad mom-ing?

By now, of course, that Golding story has been roundly raged about and mocked and thoughtfully analyzed every which way. But maybe the New York Post is right. Maybe all of us, not just Chirlane, are doing it wrong. As mothers. As wives. As women. Instead of continually messing up your life, why not just relax and let the Post tell you how to behave? Much like wandering out into the snow to die, it only feels cold at first. A few helpful hints:

Stop whining about making less than your male counterparts. Also, don’t wear sweats.

Besides their Chirlane McCray coverage, the Post has also been crushing it on the women-in-media beat this week. Columnist Andrea Peyser, who judiciously hates everything and everyone, calls the Abramson debacle “a rather tedious story about an overpaid editor of a liberal rag who believed she should make more money” and calls her “whiny.”

But that’s the opinion side of the paper — what do the Post‘s crack media reporters have to say about Abramson’s ouster? One of them, Sophia Rosenbaum, noted last week that Abramson looked “frumpy” while walking her dog at 7 a.m. Scoop!

Try getting your media commentary from the National Center for Men.

The “feminization” of news organizations is a real and terrifying scourge. To explore these not at all idiotic concerns, the Post turns to Mel Feit, the founder and spokesperson for the National Center for Men, an organization dedicated to demonstrating how men are the real victims of sexism. In January, Feit explained that NBC president and known lady Deborah Turness was shoving men out of their rightful leadership roles, creating a “sexual caste system where women do the thinking, and men do the dirty, dangerous jobs.”

Feit returned recently to explain how the New York Times, under Abramson’s rule, promoted women “preferentially”, because the paper sees women as “victims.” And that’s why only 17 of the 28 people on the Times masthead are still men.

Like the Post, Patton also believes that rape is not always rape. She’s also clear-eyed on the worth of unmarried women: squat. Patton, who recently divorced some schmuck from a no-name school, uses the word “spinster” in that Post piece above and throughout her 200-page book, always the sign of someone firmly rooted in the current decade who isn’t simmering with barely repressed self-loathing.

And finally, when in doubt:

Just make a bunch of sandwiches for your man, ladies.

Stephanie Smith spent a year literally enacting a sexist joke and now, at long last, she gets to marry this guy. And if that’s not a happy ending, we can’t imagine what more you broads want.